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April 29, 2020

mimirHome

Designing the UI and UX for a plant care app. Taking sensor data and ML to create house plant recommendations.

mimirHome is a digital application designed to support the mimirOpen project. The data collected from the sensors in the mimirOpen device can be used to answer questions like:

What kind of house plant should I get?

We can answer this question by understanding where it is going to grow. With a small home sensor and web app we can take the customer through a series of features to determine the best plant for their space, first analysing and then monitoring its success.

While I work with two engineers to bring this idea into a product, my primary job has been to design and implement the UX/UI for the app; working through ideation, wire-framing, high fidelity prototypes and data visualization. Data is processed in Javascript on the back-end via node.js and then using p5.js to visualize the data on the front-end.

Flowchart of user journey Flowchart of screen navigation

The app works to allow users to dive deeper and deeper into the data the device is collecting. On a superficial level they can see a snapshot of their rooms, spaces and plants. But if they choose then they can click further to explore each in detail with links back to larger databased of plants, shops, and analysis.

Small-multiple line charts of environmental data

As an exploration of the data, I prototyped how the data could be visualized through annotating interesting points in the data. This could be used to show the user how the environment is changing over time and how the plant is responding to the environment.

While a line graph is a conventional way of understanding the environmental data we were collecting, I ultimately wanted to connect this back to the mimir project. I wanted something more intuitive to show the relationships between days.

The data was downloaded from our server as a JSON object that could be read by a p5.js script I had written. I can quickly update the data to show the reading in real-time or explore older data to understand the changes experienced by the space